If you’ve spent more than a few minutes grappling with local SEO, you’ve probably heard of the Local Citation Finder – and there’s a good chance you use it, too. It’s one of my very favorite tools for building up my clients’ local search rankings.

I’ve used the LCF since it came out in 2010. Since then, I’ve had some questions I’ve been itching to ask – mostly about how to use the LCF to glean every last bit of local-search visibility for my clients. For that there’s no substitute for “insider tips.”

Plus, the LCF is a really popular tool, so I also wanted to learn more about some of the secrets behind its success.

I went straight to the horse’s mouth, and Darren was kind enough to answer my questions

In case you didn’t know, Darren is kind of a big deal. In some parts of the world he enjoys the spoils of an emperor:

If you have any interest in getting your business more visible in local search, or if you just want some tips on how to launch a successful venture…read on.

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Phil: If you were in an elevator with someone who knows nothing about local search, how would you explain the Local Citation Finder?

Darren: The Local Citation Finder is a competitive analysis tool for finding out where the top ranking competitors are getting citations, and for seeing where you already have citations. It will automatically tell you which ones you don’t already have, and includes SEOMoz’s Domain Authority and Majestic SEO’s ACRank metrics so that you can identify the best possible citation sources that are helping your competition rank locally.

Phil: Why should a business owner—as opposed to a local SEO junkie—get the Local Citation Finder? It’s not like that person necessarily needs to build citations every day.

Darren: Currently, I don’t think a business owner would need to use the LCF for more than a month. I think it’s pretty typical for a business owner to sign up for a month, use the tool, export a CSV for all the citation opportunities they found, and then cancel. They can then work through that list when they have time.

We are working on citation monitoring services though, so a business owner will be able to track when new citations come live, and also get notifications when their competition gets new citations. When those features roll out, a monthly subscription will make more sense for a business owner.

Phil: What would you say to someone who has all the basic citations (Yelp, SuperPages, etc.) and isn’t sure why he/she needs a tool to find more? When is “good enough” good enough?

Darren: The basic citations are an important starting point, especially the key sites you mention and the primary data aggregators, but we find that smaller city specific and industry specific sites strengthen your business’ association with your location and your niche and provide a noticeable rankings boost. The LCF helps you find these sources.

Phil: Let’s say I need to build 50 citations for my business. How much time could the Local Citation Finder save me, roughly speaking?

Darren: I suppose we need to think about what the tool does, and what it would take to do that manually.

First you would want to run a keyword search and record all the businesses that are ranking locally.

Then you would want to find and record all the sites that the first business has a citation on. You could do this through various Google queries and then paginate through the results

Repeat for each of the other ranking businesses. You would then combine the lists, cross-referencing to make sure you’re not listing the same site twice.

Finally, you would repeat the process for your own business and then make note of which sites you’re already listed on, and which ones are opportunities.

Oh, and then you’d also look up SEOMoz Domain Authority and Majestic ACRank metrics for each site.

For an efficient and focused worker, I’d guess that this manual process would take at least six to eight hours

Our tool typically returns results in one or two minutes, and this is just one keyword search. At our lowest plan level you can run up to twenty different keyword searches per day.

In addition, the tool provides direct links to the “add your business” form for thousands of sites that get returned in our results. No need to spend time hunting through the websites to find the place where you can submit.

So, roughly, I’d say that the tool saves days of work.

Phil: A lot of great tools are created by people who are fed up and just know there’s a better way to do a particular task. Before the Local Citation Finder, how many hours would you typically spend gathering citations for a given client?

Darren: Surprisingly, we didn’t do much citation building prior to developing the LCF. I was just getting interested in the topic, read a post by Garrett French about a technique you could use to find citation opportunities, and figured we could build a tool to automate the process.

Phil: Did you have a prototype that you used for your own clients, before you realized “Hey, this might make a good tool for sale”? In other words, was there an “ancestor”?

Darren: No ancestor. The first version of the tool was developed and released in three days. It was an extremely simple tool that would just email you lists of potential opportunities. You can see some screen shots of the first version of the tool on Matt McGee’s post, “Local Citation Finder: Must-Have SEO Tool”.

Phil: Yeah, I remember using it at that early stage. Why did it come along when it did (summer of 2010)? We’d known for a couple years beforehand that citations were important. There was a niche and a need for it before 2010.

Phil: Roughly how long did it take you to develop the LCF— from when it was a few neurons firing in your brain to when you put the “Order” button on the site?

Darren: The free version we developed in three days was up for about six months before we rolled out the full-blown system that exists today. A few months of solid development went into taking it from simple/free to awesome/paid. It has evolved considerably since then as well.

Phil: What’s a complaint or suggestion you’ve received on at least a couple occasions about the Local Citation Finder?

Darren: This one comes up all the time:

“Why are there so many sites that I can’t submit to?”

The answer is because the tool performs a competitive analysis to find ALL the places that the top ranked competition is getting citations. A site doesn’t have to have a “submit your business” form on it to be a good citation. In fact, just like in link building, the harder a citation is to get, the more valuable it may be.

For example, the New York Times doesn’t have a “submit your business to our local business directory form”, but if your competition has done something newsworthy and has received a citation from the NYT, that’s a great thing for you to know about so you can look at what they did to get that citation.

Phil: What’s a favorite “secret tip” of yours for getting the most benefit out of the LCF?

Darren: We use the LCF in our client work to find “hyper local/niche” citation sources that we think have a significant impact on rankings. Here’s the process:

Create a new project. Call it something like “Local-Niche citations for __business-name__”

Run a bunch of different keyword searches in your specific city and industry, and assign each search to the project you created. So, for a plumber in Denver: Denver plumbers, Denver plumbing, Denver drain cleaning, etc. Try to be exhaustive.

Go under “Your Projects”, select “view sources” for the project you created, and ALL the citation sources from all of those different queries will be listed on a single page.

Hold down Ctrl and press “f” to bring up your browser’s search function. Now search for “plumb”, “drain”, “Denver”, “Colorado”, etc. Any words, or portions of words, that are related to your location or industry. The browser search feature will find sites with these words in their domains. These are going to be some very targeted sources that should help your rankings.

Phil: How much room for improvement do you see for the LCF? Any features you’re dying to add?

Darren: Yeah, I’m dying to add the citation monitoring features I mentioned above. We’ve been super focused on our latest project, our local rank tracker, but it’s almost done, finally! Once it has launched and is stable, we’ll be jumping back to those LCF features. I also have plans for a NAP consistency tool that will complement the LCF nicely.

Phil: Tons of people in the local-search community—and many people outside of it—use or at least know about the LCF. What’s been the most important part of your strategy for “getting the word out”?

Darren: Honestly, it’s just been dumb luck. We built a tool that the community needed, and word spread naturally. People liked what we built and started blogging.

Phil: I’ve never encountered another tool that’s specifically designed for citation-gathering. There doesn’t seem to be much competition—or even any knock-offs, for that matter. Why do you think that is? Why aren’t there any Pepsis to your Coca-Cola?

Darren: Hmm. I don’t know. I suppose it’s just so narrowly focused. Citations are just one piece of the local SEO puzzle, and local SEO is just one niche within SEO overall. People that can build quality tools probably prefer to focus on bigger opportunities.

Phil: The LCF has been around for long enough that the kinks have pretty much been smoothed out. At this point, how do you spend your time on it? What work do you have to do regularly on the LCF?

Darren: Our time on the LCF is mostly support and troubleshooting at the moment. Kinks and edge cases do continue to come up, and as our user base has grown we have run into minor scaling issues here and there. There are a fair amount of behind-the-scenes processing performance and monitoring tweaks we’ve made over the past couple years. The end user doesn’t see anything different, but these tweaks keep everything running well.

Phil: What’s a tool that you, personally, would love to see someone create? (Unless it’s something you’re working on and can’t spill the beans!)

Darren: I’ve got IDEAS man! So many tool ideas. There isn’t one tool that I would love to see someone create that I don’t eventually plan to create. Sorry, nothing I can share.

Phil: What advice would you give someone who has a great idea for a local-search tool and just wants to get it off the ground? Or, for that matter, what general advice do you have for someone who has a good idea but isn’t quite sure how to develop it?

Darren: I’d advise anyone who has a great idea for a tool to email me with all the details. 😉

Really though, you just have to do it. Have an idea? Don’t sit on it. DO IT. Millions of people are sitting on great ideas and they’re all on the back burner because they’re busy with the regular day-to-day of their lives. Block out some time and force yourself to dedicate it to developing your idea.

Phil: Whitespark offers local search optimization and a bunch of other services, but you’re not some ho-hum SEO / SEM agency. You create tools. That’s kind of your niche. In general, what advice do you have for someone who’s trying to develop his/her niche and stand out from the pack?

Darren: If you want to stand out you need to do something to stand out. Building tools is one way to do that. You can also do it by picking one specific area and becoming an expert on it. I think you have done that with reviews, for one thing. You are regularly publishing excellent advice about review acquisition and that makes you stand out. I often think of you as “the review guy.”

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A HUGE thanks to Darren for his tips and insights, and for tolerating my questions :).

Comments

Great conversation here!!! I personally didn’t know the story of the beginning of the LCF and I also didn’t know it was first developed in 2010 (although it was the very first tool I started using when I joined the world of local SEO in the beginning of 2011). I am always looking forward to seeing more tools/goodies from Darren. And WOWzerz, I didn’t know he was a Chinese emperor! Is that the beginning of the Shaw dynasty? 🙂

In lieu of more excellent advice from Darren at the moment – he IS “the citations guy,” after all – my two cents is that it’s not really a matter of thinking. But rather simply of gravitating toward what interests you, and doing more of it.

I don’t consider myself the “review guy” (though I’m flattered to be called that). I’ve just always found them interesting, and businesses absolutely need them.

At least in the local SEO world, I think being a “Jack of all trades” isn’t a good thing. If my clients wanted my advice on Pinterest, my advice would be worthless. But usually one part of why they come to me in the first place is for help with reviews, because I put a decent amount of steam into learning about reviews and how best to get them from customers.

So I’d say it’s not a matter of “picking” but rather just a matter of “shipping.”

Hi Phil,
Awesome interview! I would love to learn more about the plans for a NAP consistency tool that Darren mentioned. I find that going through the process of ensuring NAP consistency, whether it be updating old addresses when a business moves, or changing the business name, can take up more time than any other optimization process. A lot of this process involves contacting the directories directly, a very tedious process to say the least.

So, if there is a tool in development out there that can speed this process up, sign me up! That would be huge.

Great question. I think it just depends on the local market: I imagine in some markets a citation from a paid-inclusion site would pack a punch. One thing I do for some of my clients is, after I find the free citations I think they’ll need, I’ll tell them “A lot of your competitors have a paid-inclusion citation on such-and-such site. I think it might help you for reasons X, Y, and Z. Just throwing it out there, in case you want to list your business on this site.”

I’d say one test of whether a given paid site is worth it is whether the Local Citation Finder tells you that a LOT of your competitors have it. Or if your top-ranked 2-3 competitors all have it.